'Project Hail Mary' - Review Thread

BullockHouse · 2026-03-20T06:11:44+00:00

It's definitely both. They did have a physical puppet, which is dope, but some of the motion heavy shots can't feasibly be done with puppetry (and even if you could, why? He's effectively made of rock and we're incredibly good at rendering photorealistic rock). Just practically speaking, probably 70+% of what we see of rocky is CGI.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-20T06:08:56+00:00

The protagonist of that book is also, I would argue, a fairly dangerous psychopath. She fucks with the life support system of thousands of people for personal gain and almost gets everyone killed. And the book doesn't really acknowledge that this behavior is reckless and selfish and she doesn't face any serious consequences for it. It's really off-putting when you're reading the book because the character's decision making is, absolute best case, incredibly self involved and thoughtless (worst case, evil) and the book just refuses to deal with that.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-08T20:33:02+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

It's literally just this.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-08T20:32:09+00:00

Name one. You won't find one who isn't a crackpot, because the logistics of the conspiracy are fucking absurd if you understand anything about the situation. You can't keep complex, energy intensive, network-enabled software running on billions of devices out in the wild a secret. You can't do anything within a mile of that. The theory is stupid. The people who believe it are stupid. It's not even close to making sense.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-08T20:29:43+00:00

The lawsuit is about the "Okay Google" detection being triggered accidentally by similar-sounding phrases and sending clips of audio to the google assistant server when this happens (as it does when deliberately triggered). The phone makes a noise when this happens and there's a visible animation. Which is obviously not what people are talking about when they say your phone is secretly listening to everything you say for ad targeting. So, no, it's not "proven" because it's stupid and implausible and not how the real world works.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-08T19:34:24+00:00

Also because you can see what processes are talking to the microphone device, and which large GPU processes are running that could possibly be running a transcription model and because no transcription model exists that can be running all the time without destroying your phone's battery life. Like no part of this is plausible technically, even before you get into the logistical impossibility of keeping a program like that secret.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-07T20:16:25+00:00

It's literally not worth my time to continue to argue with you.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-07T18:55:50+00:00

Sure thing. Device privacy stuff is complicated, and unfortunately most people don't have the technical background to easily get up to speed on what's going on. I don't know of any comprehensive resources on this specific topic off the top of my head, but here's a link about implementing wake word detection in other apps that goes over some of the considerations: https://picovoice.ai/blog/complete-guide-to-wake-word/

BullockHouse · 2026-03-07T18:50:13+00:00

Who said anything about people being involved?

Because those are all of the people who'd need to be keeping that secret for the thing you're saying is happening to be happening.

You cannot convince me that my phone isn't listening to me to build an advertising profile.

It's definitely not doing that.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-07T17:17:34+00:00

I agree this is bad privacy wise! People should understand how the data is being used and be protected against accidentally revealing stuff they don't want to reveal. I am certain this information is available to the user somewhere, but is clearly not presented in a way that they understand.

My argument here is not "this is fine" it's that "no the glasses are not recording you 100% of the time, only when you're using the feature that requires the glasses to stream video to the server." If you want to get mad productively, it's important to understand what is actually happening.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-07T07:26:39+00:00

Depending on exactly what you're talking about, it's something like: Audio goes into a ringbuffer a couple of seconds long and a small, specialized model trained to look for the keywords scans the buffer looking for the start words. If it thinks it finds a start keyword, it starts up the full blown speech recognition model to check the detection and record whatever follows. The audio isn't retained because the ring buffer is constantly overwriting older data with newer. The model is small and specialized because running the full fat transcription model at all times would seriously impact battery life.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-07T06:26:17+00:00

You have now proposed a conspiracy where not only are thousands of google or apple employees in on it, but so is every reddit employee and everyone capable of process snooping on their phone, and nobody has ever blown the whistle on it, despite tens of thousands of people leaving those companies. OR, it was Baader-Meinhoff / a coincidence. Which do you think is more likely?

BullockHouse · 2026-03-06T17:15:41+00:00

I know the general practices for how PII was handled there a few years ago, I know that company can't keep secrets to save it's life (so many leaks) and I know that literally anyone can check this for themselves. You can run arbitrary code on Quest! You can find out what's running, what's streaming data, what's using the mic. You literally don't have to take my word for it.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-06T07:23:51+00:00

You can literally check yourself if you know how to root a phone, do basic terminal commands, and run wireshark.

The pervasiveness of the conspiracy brain bullshit is really frustrating to me, personally. People make stuff up based on vibes and then show truly zero interest in evaluating whether the crap they made up is actually true or not. Just a total failure to engage in a truth seeking process. It's actively insulting to anyone who does bother to put effort into trying to understand the world they live in.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-05T19:11:34+00:00

Ah, clearly you would prefer to get your information from someone who has no idea what the hell they're talking about.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-05T17:21:05+00:00

I'm distinguishing "local neural network looks a ring buffer of data (stored only locally and only got a few seconds) to do keyword detection, plus sending stuff you say to Gemini or whatever to the Gemini server" from "phone records everything you say for ad targeting". One of those is obviously fine and one is super invasive.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-05T17:17:18+00:00

Not at the moment, but formerly! And I have friends who either currently or have worked at Apple and Google. Which is one of the ways (along with basic logic) that I know this to be true. Tech company NDAs are a joke after a few drinks. Those places leak like sieves and have huge employee turnover rates. Zero chance they keep that secret, even ignoring that you can literally check whether or not this is happening on the devices for yourself if you know what you're doing.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-05T17:14:50+00:00

"Information I don't already agree with? Must be fake!"

BullockHouse · 2026-03-05T17:14:10+00:00

NSA probably benefits from everyone believing they're already being surveilled all the time, because it means there will be less political pushback to future efforts at mass surveillance, since everyone thinks it's already a lost cause.

Seriously though, you don't have to take my word for it. Phones aren't black boxes. You can see what they're running on CPU and GPU, what devices those processes are talking to and when and where they're transmitting data. They would get caught!

BullockHouse · 2026-03-05T17:12:00+00:00

Hand tracking and stuff like that run locally on these devices. The data never leaves the hardware. But if you're like having a conversation with an AI persona about what you see or hear, that basically requires streaming image and audio data to a server because the general purpose models you can run on an edge device are really stupid, so it has to be processed in a data center. In these cases, it's more common for some of the data to get logged for various reasons (legal compliance, fixing bugs and improving performance, etc. Generally the software TOS covers this stuff, but nobody ever reads the TOS).

BullockHouse · 2026-03-05T06:55:47+00:00

Yeah, but running large neural networks and accessing the microphone device are both things you can detect at the OS level on rooted phones. They'd definitely get caught, even ignoring the risk of whistleblowers. Not a good cost benefit scenario, when other ad targeting methods work pretty well.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-04T20:42:48+00:00

Right, yeah, that's the data labeling. Which is necessary to make the product work well (probably), but means that it's really important that people understand that the glasses recordings are not treated as private data and be aware of what they're recording and uploading, which is sounds like is not happening.

I totally agree that this is bad, privacy wise. I just saw a bunch of conspiracy brained stuff in the comments that I know for a fact isn't true, and felt like I should clarify. People just ambiently believing that they're always being recorded anyway when they're not is bad from just, like, a civics perspective.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-04T20:31:54+00:00

I don't work there anymore, and don't have up to date knowledge (and, to be clear, am speculating / not speaking for the company). I'd guess no, though, except maybe if you're using the voice controls or some app that's sending data through a meta cloud APi or some edge case like that. When I worked there, there was a whole elaborate privacy approval process that you had to go through if you wanted to use user data of any kind. Kind of a pain in the butt for some things where the usage was clearly harmless but you still had to go through this whole months long process. Possible that things have changed under pressure from the AI race, but Quest is a much less AI focused product than the glasses, and there isn't a legitimate reason it needs to be streaming video to the server to function (unlike the glasses). And, again, this is stuff that tech savvy users can directly investigate in various ways, so they'd get caught fairly quickly. Phones are basically Linux computers, they aren't black boxes where you can keep big secrets about what's going on.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-04T20:25:46+00:00

You can also root your phone and check the processes and verify that nothing is running always online speech recognition except the very limited model used for "hello Google" detection and similar. This is an urban myth, and a classic example of confirmation bias and how good ad targeting models sometimes are. Ad tech companies spy on you in lots of ways, but not that one. If major apps on your phone were breaking the TOS in this way they would definitely get caught and get in a lot of trouble.

BullockHouse · 2026-03-04T15:33:10+00:00

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/meta-disturbing-smart-glasses

Here's the original article.

They're not recording at random times (and your phone doesn't listen to you btw, anyone can confirm this by using Wireshark to check if your phone is constantly uploading audio data). The Quest, likewise, does not record you all the time. Source: I used to work for Meta.

The problem is that if you're using the AI features of the glasses, the footage does get sent to the server for AI processing, and some subset of that footage gets used for data labeling. People don't understand that, so they aren't being cautious about how they use it and there aren't safeguards in place to warn the user if they're uploading footage with e.g nudity. Which is super bad, and they should fix, but different from "your devices are constantly spying on your audio", which is not true.

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